Re: paleonet Vladimir V. Missarzhevsky

["Jere H. Lipps" <jlipps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stefan:

I am sorry to hear this.  I met him outside the gates of the field trip 
compound in Kazakhstan in 1990.  Seemed like a nice, but out spoken, guy.

I suppose the deadline and release time for PaleoElectronica are 
significantly different again?  We do better with printed material, I hate 
to remind you, although I know you are not one of the big-time editors.

A question:  When you say in your third alternative for the traces in your 
science paper, that they could represent crown group metazoans, do you mean 
bilaterians?

Jere


At 12:59 PM 6/18/02 , you wrote:
>Word has just reached us belatedly from Moscow that Vladimir V. 
>Missarzhevsky died of cancer in March.
>
>Missarzhevsky was the father of the systematic study of the early skeletal 
>faunas that herald the incoming Cambrian biota. The term "small shelly 
>fossils" for this bewildering array of shells, sclerites, tubes and 
>spicules was coined by himself and Crosbie Matthews in a 1975 review 
>paper, which was the first serious introduction of his work to the 
>English-reading public. In the 1960s he was co-author of the famous 
>Tommotian Stage in Siberia, then regarded as the first expression of the 
>Cambrian biota, before the appearance of trilobites. His later work was 
>devoted to the demonstration that the Tommotian is preceded by a 
>significant succession with skeletal biota, which he formalized as the 
>Manykaian Stage (approximate equivalent of the Nemakit-Daldynian).
>
>Volodya Missarzhevsky was a gifted and ebullient scientist whose lack of 
>diplomatic finesse kept him in the backrooms of Soviet palaeontology. 
>Never given the opportunity for international travel and exchange, he 
>escaped wide international recognition, but his work on the Early Cambrian 
>"small shelly fossils" became one of the cornerstones on which the modern 
>revolutionary insights into the Cambrian explosion have been built.
>
>--
>Stefan Bengtson
>Senior Curator (invertebrate fossils)
>Swedish Museum of Natural History
>Department of Palaeozoology
>Box 50007
>SE-104 05 Stockholm
>Sweden
>
>tel. +46-8 5195 4220
>      +46-8 732 5218 (home)
>fax  +46-8 5195 4184
>e-mail stefan.bengtson@nrm.se